Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Preached for the 50th Anniversary Celebration
with Advent, Charlotte - February
10, 2019.

They
were in the fish business and Jesus called them to the people business.
Apparently, fishing was a transferrable skill. If you could catch fish, you
could catch people. It was all about the catching.

Now,
through the centuries, this has been a classic text for evangelism. Christians
point to Luke 5 and say, “Just like Peter, James and John, we’re all called to
fish for people.”

But
that’s meant different things in different contexts. We live in a very
different culture today than the twelve who followed Jesus or the first
Christians who heard these words. In
the United States we Christians are not in the minority, and we’re not being
persecuted for our faith. We also have a global awareness that tells us there
are other paths to God that make as much sense to their adherents as
Christianity does to us. We have an awareness that, for the most part, religion
is a product of our birth. So, within our context, what does it mean for us to catch
people?

For
a long time, the whole idea of fishing for people got my hackles up. I thought
of those who evangelized and kept track of the souls they saved like people who
were competing for first prize in a fishing derby. I found this so offensive
that I couldn’t bring myself to participate. If that’s what it means to catch
people, count me out. But, as I’ve gone back to this text, I’ve been energized
by one word in particular: net.

Fishermen
like Peter, James and John didn’t fish with a pole. They didn’t lure fish with
bait, one at a time, until each fish got caught on a hook and they reeled it
in. It would have been hard to make a living like that. They fished with a net.
They put the net down into the water and waited for the fish. They didn’t
really catch the fish with the net so much as the fish got caught in the net.

That
kind of catching people makes sense to me because that’s the way it worked for
me. Some of you may recall that I didn’t grow up in a church family. It just
wasn’t a part of my life. But there was always this net in my life. It was made
up of the neighbors who took me to Sunday school with them when I was little,
the girlfriends who invited me to tag along to confirmation classes at the
Lutheran Church, the high school friend who talked about Jesus all the time as
if he were her best friend, the roommate in college who said her prayers every
night, went to church on Sundays, and was gentle and loving with everyone she
encountered. The group gathered at the pond, baptizing a young woman, just
outside my room at the dorm. The Christians singing hymns under a shelter at
the park while I was taking a walk. The students engaged in a discussion about
the Bible at the table next to mine while I was trying to study at the student
union. (They had no idea I was eavesdropping.) The young man I came to care for
deeply, before I learned that he was a Pentecostal Christian. The net was wide
and I got caught in it.

That’s
the way it worked for me, and I suspect that that’s the way it works for most
people. There’s a net in our lives. It may include our parents or grandparents,
our Sunday school teachers, our friends, the stranger who offers a random act
of kindness, an author who speaks to your soul, the person who stands on the
corner asking for help with a cardboard sign in his hand that reads, “God
bless.”

The
net may be invisible to you, but when you open your eyes to it, you see it
everywhere, telling you that God is here, that God loves you, and that life in
the net is life in all its fullness. And the net calls you to become a part of
the net yourself, so that you too are a part of telling others that God is
here, that God loves you, and that life in the net is life in all its fullness.

That
means that it matters how we live in the world. In our day, it seems that those
of us who call ourselves Christians often do more to repel people than catch
them.

Once
a day I skim through my twitter feed to see what folks are saying, and with
each passing day I’m more and more troubled by the things Christians are
releasing into the universe that are not at all Christ-like. In our
super-charged political atmosphere, it’s a challenge to disagree while still
loving one another. Instead, I see Christians attacking one another, cursing,
and pronouncing eternal damnation upon anyone who disagrees with them. That’s
not how to catch people. It’s not what the Reign of God is about. The Reign of
God is like a net.

And
then, once you become a part of God’s people, the church, you learn something
deeper about becoming a part of the net. Its purpose is for catching, to be
sure. But catching is not about trapping someone or holding them captive. This
net operates much like the net you see under a tightrope act at the circus. The
net is here to catch us when we fall.

I’ve
experienced that many times in my life, but at no time more clearly than when I
came to be your pastor at Advent over 20 years ago. When I arrived, I was a
mess.

I
had been married for 20 years to another pastor who, it turned out, slept with
other women who happened to be members of the church we pastored together. Although
the last thing I wanted to ever be was divorced, I didn’t really have a choice
in the matter.

And
then, while I was an emotional disaster, and in no position to make major life
decisions, I became involved with an old high school flame, and I married him,
only to discover that he was already married to someone else.

You only
knew an inkling of what I was going through when I came to you, but I really
was in no condition to be your pastor. I wanted to start my life over, but that
didn’t happen automatically when I left Ohio and moved to North Carolina. I
left behind a church I loved, my dearest friends in the world, my entire support
system, even my son, who had one more year of high school. I left it all behind
and moved to a place where I was absolutely alone.

For
the first couple of years that I served you, at the end of every day when I got
in the car, I cried the whole way home it continued through the night. You had
no way of knowing, and I was too ashamed to tell you.

What
I experienced at Advent was a net that was waiting to catch me. Every day and
at every turn, I heard God telling me, “I’m here. You’ll be okay, You’ll get
past this, You are loved, Nancy.” I heard it through you. In your words, in
your actions, in faithful lives that taught me that the Reign of God is like a
net. Thank you for being my net at a time when I needed it the most. I can say
with all certainty that I would not be here without you.

I
know I’m not the only one. Through the years, Advent has caught many people in
their net through your ministries in the community and world, through the
people who have passed through your doors, through those who have gone on from
this place to be a part of other nets on other shores.

I’m
honored to have been among you for a short time, and I’m deeply honored to be
with you as you celebrate 50 years of ministry here at Advent. Your net has
been strong.

May
you continue to catch people and show them that the Reign of God is like a net.

Friday, January 11, 2019

This week during confirmation class we got into the topic of
circumcision. It’s always fun to break this news to a room filled
with unsuspecting 7th and 8th graders. This year’s class did not
disappoint me. Their faces revealed shock, disgust, disbelief, and, of course,
embarrassment to hear their pastor speaking so matter-of-factly about something
so grizzly happening the male penis. Yes, it’s always a special moment.

And it took me back to an episode from my life that I had
forgotten about. I may not be getting all the details correct, because it was
so long ago, but this is the way I remember it…

In one of my previous lives I was quite involved in
Christian Education events for my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church
in America. We were having a regional conference of some sort for educators. I
was involved in the planning and all the educator-types from Chicago and
Minneapolis were on the scene, as well. For some reason, I either offered or
was offered up, I had responsibility for our entertainment one evening and
ended up moderating a “Hollywood Squares” game with silly questions that only
Christian Educators would appreciate.

One of the better questions I asked was, “What is the one
question confirmation instructors are asked that they fear the most?” The
answer, of course, was, “What is circumcision?”

It was a cute moment and I might have moved on to the next
question, but I saw an opening for a big moment and I went for it.

“You know, I've been reading a lot about whales lately, and do you know how long the male appendage of a blue whale is?”
This was before
smart-phones, so no one knew the answer.

“Ten feet!" I announced with all the amazement in my voice I could muster. "The male appendage on a blue whale is ten feet
long!” Reading the faces of my audience, I could tell that they were more
puzzled than impressed. Why is this woman talking about whale penises at a big
church event? I suspect they were a little worried about what I was going to
say next.

“…so do you know how they circumcise a blue whale?” And now no
one in the audience seemed to be breathing… “Well, it takes four skin-divers.”

The room expoded in laughter. They went nuts. Yes, it was a
BIG moment.

And then I heard it. Garrison Keillor says, “Do you know how
they circumcise a blue whale?” and the punch line follows, “It takes four skin-divers.”

I nearly drove off the road. “He stole my joke! He stole my
joke!” I’m yelling and pounding on the steering wheel.

Obviously, someone from that conference retold my joke and
it made its way to “The Prairie Home Companion.” Garrison Keillor may not have
known it was my joke, but he stole my joke. Without the lead-in, it wasn’t
nearly as funny, but he most definitely stole my freaking joke!

I guess when you release a circumcision joke into the
universe, it belongs to the universe.

About Me

Nancy is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She serves at Ascension Lutheran Church in Towson, Maryland. Nancy grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, and then served time at Bowling Green State University, before moving on to Trinity Seminary in Columbus. Starting out in North Dakota, she then returned to Ohio and served churches there before landing in North Carolina, where she served at two different congregations in Charlotte. She was also on the bishop's staff and earned a PhD from Pitt during her spare time in the area of religion and education. She considers herself an educator who happens to be a pastor and it makes a difference in how she does ministry. She is a divorce survivor, and the mother of two artsy-fartsy children who abandoned her when they became adults. Now she shares a home with Father Guido Sarducci, her tuxedo cat.